Friday, 17 February 2017

[This is my submission to the Westminster Culture Media and Sport Committee's enquiry into 'Fake News']

Before the 2015 General Election, a Scotland Office official leaked a story claiming that Nicola Sturgeon had told the French Ambassador, Sylvie Bermann, that she favoured the Conservatives to win. An enquiry was launched into the leak. Alistair Carmichael MP told that enquiry that he had not known of the leak until it appeared in the press. The election happened, and the Right Honourable Liar Carmichael was duly elected as member for Orkney and Shetland.

I can call him Liar Carmichael, because Lord Matthews and Lady Paton, presiding in the Electoral Court in Edinburgh, judged that he had told a lie (paragraph 44 of Lady Paton's judgement). He told a lie, because, as he freely admitted after he had been elected, he had ordered the leak himself. And yet the court judged that his election should stand: that it is acceptable for a politician to lie in order to be elected.

Let's be clear about this: there is a problem with fake news. But fake news does not just happen. It is created: and it is created by bad political actors. People who engage in politics in bad faith, who choose to lie to achieve political ends which they could not achieve honestly.

Alistair Carmichael's election in the famously upright constituency of Orkney and Shetland was secured by a lie. The vote to take the UK out of the EU was secured by a lie. But there are no consequences for the liars: no penalties. Alistair Carmichael keeps his seat and his salary. And while the UK is dragged out of the EU, Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, Priti Patel, Andrea Leadsom and Chris Grayling all sit at the cabinet table.

None of these people has been banned from public office; none, in fact, has even chosen to resign it. None has been fined. None has been imprisoned. Indeed, in an extraordinary inversion of common sense, each of these people, who have chosen to use mendacity to secure factional political ends where honesty would not have served, are entitled to be known as 'the Right Honourable'. This is irony forged from the finest ores.

A democracy cannot survive under these circumstances. In a country in which it is acceptable to lie to gain office or to influence great decisions of state, the popular vote is meaningless, since it is impossible for the voters to trust their representatives.